Jean Paul Gaultier to Collaborate With Shayne Oliver

Jean Paul Gaultier has added a expertise to its visitor designer programme, tapping Shayne Oliver — the co-founder of Hood By Air who left the design collective final yr — to design a ready-to-wear capsule for the Paris-based model.

In a group of round 50 gadgets seen by BoF that includes distressed, gauzy overlays, bumster silhouettes, ultra-wide-leg denim and the logos of imagined streetwear labels like “GLTR Sportswear,” Oliver turns an eye fixed knowledgeable by New York counterculture to the gothic romance, excessive drama and lighthearted kitsch current in Gaultier’s archive.

Gaultier plans to launch the gathering in New York on Could 6 — the identical night time because the Met Gala — throwing an after-hours social gathering for the undertaking on American trend’s greatest night time.

Oliver says he drew inspiration from the best way Gaultier shook up the style institution within the Nineteen Nineties by placing informal staples like denim on the couture catwalk. The period mirrors his personal method to trend: his earlier work at Hood By Air remodeled foundational parts of American avenue fashion like T-shirts and durags, exaggerating and twisting them to create a bracing mix of social commentary and runway couture.

“I didn’t need the gathering to be about swag-ifying one thing excessive forehead. It felt extra natural for me to critique the issues I discover essential within the trendy wardrobe, and amplify that,” Oliver stated in an interview by telephone. “There was quite a lot of frequent floor there.”

The gathering about “utilitarianism, femininity, energy and play” is designed to be worn “from couture to the bed room flooring,” Oliver stated.

The provocative, but wearable line might assist revive consciousness for Gaultier’s extra elevated ready-to-wear propositions after years by which essentially the most seen parts of the model have been both its theatrical high fashion appears to be like, or on the different finish of the spectrum, sailor-striped T-shirts and perfumes that generate nearly all of gross sales.

Jean Paul Gaultier suspended its ready-to-wear operations in 2014, and the designer stepped again from designing his home’s high fashion reveals in 2020. Since then, the model (owned by Spanish fragrance large Puig) has leaned on a visitor designer programme that’s featured Sacai’s Chitose Abe, Y/Challenge’s Glenn Martens, Simone Rocha, Haider Ackermann and Olivier Rousteing to create high fashion collections for the home.

The model has additionally quietly constructed again up its presence in ready-to-wear with a mixture of accessible capsules impressed by its high fashion outings, reissued archival appears to be like and collaborations with manufacturers like London-based KNWLS.

Proprietor Puig, whose internet revenues reached €4.3 billion final yr, just lately confirmed plans to boost €2.5 billion in an preliminary public providing within the Spanish inventory alternate. The deal will enable its founding household to retain the “overwhelming majority” of voting rights, the corporate has stated.